Archive for September 15th, 2010

The openSUSE Conference brings together users, contributors and friends of the openSUSE project from 20th to 23rd October in Nuremberg, Germany. Over four days, more thanÂ seventy talks and workshops explore the theme of â€˜Collaboration Across Bordersâ€˜ in Free and Open Source software communities, administration and development. The conference is the yearly get-together ofÂ the openSUSE project to give its people a chance to meet face to face, talk to and inspire each other. It takes place in the BerufsfÃ¶rderungswerk Nuremberg in the beautiful surroundings of the Franconian metropole. Everybody interested is welcome to join and enjoy the program which starts each day at 9am, the admission is free. The openSUSE Conference 2010 Sneak Peaks will introduce some speakers and talks to you.

Hey Vincent, glad to have you on this series. Let’s talk (about) the talk. First of all I would like you to introduce yourself to the, likely, small crowd of people who don’t know you yet. Who are you and what do you do?

For the very few people who don’t know me (I estimate there are only a few billions out there), I’m Vincent. The two important things to know about me are that I’m French and I love ice cream. And when I’m not eating ice cream, I also contribute to free software! I work on openSUSE and on GNOME, and apparently, I can also work on both at the same time, when I work on GNOME in openSUSE :-) Thanks to Novell, I can contribute on my work time since I’m a member of the openSUSE Boosters.

… and here we are, thinking you only eat baguettes!

So, obviously, I don’t know if your baguette comment will end up in the interview. But if it does, I have to mention that ice cream and baguettes do not mix well.

Everything will end up in the interview, so behave! :) Okay given the title of your talk, Explaining GNOME 3, i take it it will be about explaining gnome 3 right? What needs explaining there?

Ah, I guess, one thing to know about me too is that I submit talks with titles, without knowing what I’ll talk about ;-) So it could well be that “Explaining GNOME 3” turns out to be about something completely different. That being said, I might keep the submitted topic since GNOME 3 is a big step for the GNOME project, and what we are trying to achieve is not always crystal clear from the outside. There are at least two parts of the talks that I can think of right now, which will likely be of interest to the audience:

Why does the GNOME project need to do GNOME 3, instead of keeping the 2.x way forever? After all, GNOME 2.x is all about evolutionary steps, and that’s something we could keep doing.

The vision of what we want GNOME 3 to be. People do not always see the long-term vision of a project, and clarifying it does help understand the changes we’re implementing.

A third part that we feel is important is explaining GNOME Shell: it’s a big move where people feel it will directly affect their interaction with the computer